Index
Links: 2007 - All years
- Original The Apache Software Foundation
Board of Directors Meeting Minutes
September 19, 2007
1. Call to order
The meeting was scheduled for 10:00 (Pacific) and begin when
a sufficient attendance to constitute a quorum was recognized
by the chairman at 10:01. The meeting was held by teleconference,
hosted by Jim Jagielski and Covalent:
US Number : 800-531-3250
International : 303-928-2693
IRC #asfboard on irc.freenode.net was used for backup purposes.
2. Roll Call
Directors Present:
Justin Erenkrantz
J Aaron Farr
Jim Jagielski
Geir Magnusson Jr
William Rowe Jr (arrived at 10:05)
Sam Ruby
Henning Schmiedehausen
Greg Stein
Henri Yandell
Directors Absent:
None
Guests:
Sander Striker
Rich Bowan
Lars Eilebrecht
Brett Porter (joined at 10:25)
3. Minutes from previous meetings
Minutes (in Subversion) are found under the URL:
https://svn.apache.org/repos/private/foundation/board/
A. The meeting of August 1, 2007
See: board_agenda_2007_08_01.txt
Minutes were not yet available for approval; deferred.
B. The meeting of August 29, 2007
Minutes were not yet available for approval; deferred.
4. Executive Officer Reports
A. Chairman [Jim]
Not too much to report this month. The biggest item of notice
is the board's continuing effort to get into a groove and
the officers getting settled into their roles. Thankfully,
this has not affected the ASF itself, which is still ticking
along nicely. The Incubator is still seeing proposals for
new projects and podlings are graduating periodically. The various
projects themselves run the range of high-activity/many releases
to low-activity/almost-hibernation.
B. President [Justin]
Due to the short interval from the last meeting, there is not
much to report.
Work continues in infrastructure - dealing with failed hard drives,
wiki spam attacks, improving virtualization settings, keeping
machines up-to-date, and bringing replacement machines online.
With the current resources available, we're able to keep the major
services online, but we don't have the resources to be proactive as
I'd like. We have had some downtime of JIRA - our Atlassian contact
is on vacation and no one on our side is capable of maintaining it,
so we're reduced to blindly restarting JIRA when it fails without
any insight as to what is wrong or how to fix it. Any discussion
of moving away from JIRA would very likely cause immense negative
feedback (as many folks like its user interface), so we continue
to be stuck in a bad position with respect to JIRA.
I have been in discussions with Charel Morris from SCP regarding
the OS Summit Asia contract. It is hoped to transfer this task
to the new ConCom VP as soon as feasible.
C. Treasurer [J Aaron]
An updated invoice for the Yahoo! sponsorship went out on
September 8th. The original invoice was missing a PO number
which is the cause of the hold-up.
There are actually a number of outstanding items that need to
be handled by the treasurer including reimbursements to members
(Geir). There also a recent email requesting a 10k payment
to a "OB10 system" from HP.
Paypal $ 1,720.59 ($+ 822.59)
Checking $ 46,020.64 ($- 5,776.22)
Savings $155,110.67 ($+ 311.90)
Total $202,851.90 ($- 4,641.73)
As for the transition to for new officers, I'm not sure the
status on getting Sam Ruby on the account. Wells Fargo still
lists the credit card accounts as belonging to Justin, Jim, and
Sander.
Jim and Justin were directed to provide "HP" login information
to Aaron.
D. Exec. V.P. and Secretary [Sam]
I've heard nothing back from Wells Fargo. How should I follow up?
This isn't urgent at the moment, but when it does become needed,
it likely will be urgent at that time.
I am in possession of a signed Consultant Services Agreement which
extends Jon Jagielski's contract to March 1, 2008 and expands the
scope include to "or other documents" received by FAX.
I've seen two requests for information concerning a CLA that
Gerolf Seitz allegedly faxed, but no response from the contractor.
I appologize for the backlog of minutes, this will be corrected by
week's end.
Sam was directed to being the process for renewing Joe's contract.
5. Additional Officer Reports
A. VP of Legal Affairs [Sam Ruby]
Brief discussion concerning the possible need to change the bylaws.
We decided not to pursue such a change.
Approved by General Consent.
B. VP of JCP [Geir]
See Attachment 2
Question was asked of Geir as to whether he expected Sun to change
as a result of this vote. Geir seemed less hopeful than before.
Approved by General Consent.
C. Apache Security Team Project [Mark Cox / Greg]
See Attachment 3
Approved by General Consent.
D. Apache Travel Assistance Committee [Will Glass-Husain / Bill]
See Attachment 4
Bill directed to pursue revitalization of this committee.
Approved by General Consent.
E. Apache Conference Planning Project [Ken Coar / Sam]
See Attachment 5
Project looks healthy, the board is aware of transparency
perception issues. The question was raised whether or not
it would help if the project had a secretary. It was observed
that Shane was defacto acting in this capacity.
Approved by General Consent.
F. Apache Audit Project [Henri Yandell]
See Attachment 6
Additionally, it was noted that Henri checked the tax return.
Justin was tasked with checking if there is a legal requirement
for an external audit.
Approved by General Consent.
G. Apache Public Relations Project [Jim Jagielski]
See Attachment 7
Approved by General Consent.
6. Committee Reports
A. Apache APR Project [Bill Rowe]
See Attachment A
Approved by General Consent.
B. Apache Cayenne Project [Andrus Adamchik / Justin]
See Attachment B
Approved by General Consent.
C. Apache Commons Project [Torsten Curdt / Henri]
See Attachment C
Henri to look into what "sponsor" means in this context.
Approved by General Consent.
D. Apache Excalibur Project [J. Aaron Farr]
See Attachment D
Approved by General Consent.
E. Apache Felix Project [Richard Hall / Jim]
See Attachment E
Approved by General Consent.
F. Apache Gump Project [Stefan Bodewig / J. Aaron]
See Attachment F
Approved by General Consent.
G. Apache Harmony Project [Tim Ellison / Henning]
See Attachment G
In addition, the chair for this project provided the following
statement:
IMO there is a huge pent-up frustration with the lack of
JCK for Harmony, and if it were to be made available it
would unlock a phenomenal effort to get the code passing,
and a real release out.
Approved by General Consent.
H. Apache iBATIS Project [Ted Husted / Geir]
See Attachment H
Approved by General Consent.
I. Apache Incubator Project [Noel J. Bergman / Greg]
See Attachment I
Approved by General Consent.
J. Apache Jackrabbit Project [Jukka Zitting / Jim]
See Attachment J
Approved by General Consent.
K. Apache Jakarta Project [Martin van den Bemt / Sam]
See Attachment K
Approved by General Consent.
L. Apache Labs Project [Stefano Mazzocchi / Bill]
See Attachment L
Approved by General Consent.
M. Apache Lucene Project [Doug Cutting / J. Aaron]
See Attachment M
Approved by General Consent.
N. Apache Maven Project [Jason van Zyl / Henri]
See Attachment N
Action item: Sam to build a "fork" FAQ.
Approved by General Consent.
O. Apache ODE Project [Matthieu Riou / Geir]
See Attachment O
Approved by General Consent.
P. Apache OFBiz Project [David E. Jones / Justin]
See Attachment P
Approved by General Consent.
Q. Apache Portals Project [David Sean Taylor / Henning]
See Attachment Q
Approved by General Consent.
R. Apache Quetzalcoatl Project [Gregory Trubetskoy / Geir]
See Attachment R
Approved by General Consent.
S. Apache SpamAssassin Project [Justin Mason / Greg]
See Attachment S
Approved by General Consent.
T. Apache Tiles Project [Greg Reddin / Henri]
See Attachment T
Approved by General Consent.
U. Apache Tomcat Project [Mladen Turk / Bill]
See Attachment U
Discussion on dual design approaches, overall feeling is that
this will resolve itself, several directors indicated that they
will watch this project.
Approved by General Consent.
V. Apache Web Services Project [Davanum Srinivas / Sam]
See Attachment V
Sam to pursue obtaining a report for next month
W. Apache Wicket Project [Martijn Dashorst / Jim]
See Attachment W
Approved by General Consent.
X. Apache Xerces Project [Gareth Reakes / J. Aaron]
See Attachment X
Approved by General Consent.
Y. Apache XMLBeans Project [Cezar Andrei / Justin]
See Attachment Y
Approved by General Consent.
7. Special Orders
A. Establish the Apache ServiceMix project
WHEREAS, the Board of Directors deems it to be in the best
interests of the Foundation and consistent with the Foundation's
purpose to establish a Project, to be known as "Apache ServiceMix
Project", related to an extensible messaging bus for service
integration, mediation and composition and its related
components, for distribution at no charge to the public.
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that a Project Management
Committee (PMC) is hereby established pursuant to Bylaws of the
Foundation; and be it further
RESOLVED, that the Apache ServiceMix PMC be and hereby is charged
with the creation and maintenance of "Apache ServiceMix"; and be
it further
RESOLVED, that the office of "Vice President, Apache ServiceMix"
be and hereby is created, the person holding such office to serve
at the direction of the Board of Directors as the chair of the
Apache ServiceMix PMC, and to have primary responsibility for
management of the projects within the scope of responsibility of
the Apache ServiceMix PMC; and be it further
RESOLVED, that the persons listed immediately below be and hereby
are appointed to serve as the initial members of the Apache
ServiceMix PMC:
* Hiram Chirino <chirino@apache.org>
* Adrian Co <aco@apache.org>
* Rob Davies <rajdavies@apache.org>
* Philips Dodds <pdodds@apache.org>
* Jeff Genender <jgenender@apache.org>
* Matt Hogstrom <hogstrom@apache.org>
* David Jencks <djencks@apache.org>
* Jacek Laskowski <jlaskowski@apache.org>
* Jonas Lim <jlim@apache.org>
* Aaron Mulder <ammulder@apache.org>
* Guillaume Nodet <gnodet@apache.org>
* Bruce Snyder <bsnyder@apache.org>
* James Strachan <jstrachan@apache.org>
* Thomas Termin <tterm@apache.org>
* Gert Vanthienen <gertv@apache.org>
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that Guillaume Nodet be
appointed to the office of Vice President, Apache ServiceMix, to
serve in accordance with and subject to the direction of the
Board of Directors and the Bylaws of the Foundation until death,
resignation, retirement, removal or disqualification, or until a
successor is appointed; and be it further
RESOLVED, that the Apache ServiceMix Project be and hereby is
tasked with the migration and rationalization of the Apache
Incubator ServiceMix podling; and be it further
RESOLVED, that all responsibilities pertaining to the Apache
Incubator ServiceMix podling encumbered upon the Apache Incubator
PMC are hereafter discharged.
Special Order 7A, Establish the Apache ServiceMix project, was
approved by Unanimous Vote.
B. Change the Apache Web Services Project Chair
WHEREAS, the Board of Directors heretofore appointed
Davanum Srinivas to the office of Vice President, Apache Web
Services, and
WHEREAS, the Board of Directors is in receipt of the resignation
of Davanum Srinivas from the office of Vice President, Apache
Web Services, and
WHEREAS, the Project Management Committee of the Apache Web
Services project has chosen by vote to recommend Glen Daniels as
the successor to the post;
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that Davanum Srinivas is relieved
and discharged from the duties and responsibilities of the office
of Vice President, Apache Web Services, and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that Glen Daniels be and hereby is
appointed to the office of Vice President, Apache Web Services, to
serve in accordance with and subject to the direction of the
Board of Directors and the Bylaws of the Foundation until
death, resignation, retirement, removal or disqualification, or
until a successor is appointed.
Special Order 7B, Change the Apache Web Services Project Chair, was
approved by Unanimous Vote.
C. Change the Apache Excalibur Project Chair
WHEREAS, the Board of Directors heretofore appointed J. Aaron
Farr to the office of Vice President, Apache Excalibur, and
WHEREAS, the Board of Directors is in receipt of the
resignation of J. Aaron Farr from the office of Vice President,
Apache Excalibur, and
WHEREAS, the Project Management Committee of the Apache
Excalibur project has chosen by vote to recommend Carsten
Ziegeler as the successor to the post;
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that J. Aaron Farr is relieved
and discharged from the duties and responsibilities of the office
of Vice President, Apache Excalibur, and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that Carsten Ziegeler be and hereby is
appointed to the office of Vice President, Apache Excalibur, to
serve in accordance with and subject to the direction of the
Board of Directors and the Bylaws of the Foundation until
death, resignation, retirement, removal or disqualification, or
until a successor is appointed.
Special Order 7C, Change the Apache Excalibur Project Chair, was
approved by Unanimous Vote.
D. Update Public Relations Committee Membership
WHEREAS, the Public Relations Committee (PRC) of
The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) expects to better serve
its purpose through the periodic update of its membership; and
WHEREAS, the PRC is a Board-appointed committee whose
membership must be approved by Board resolution.
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that the following ASF
member be added as Public Relations Committee member:
Ted Husted <husted@apache.org>
Special Order 7D, Update Public Relations Committee Membership, was
approved by Unanimous Vote.
8. Discussion Items
We discussed what an action item is. A request was made that
everybody who sees something that specifically requires tracking
call out said items.
9. Review Outstanding Action Items
Geir: update http://www.apache.org/jcp/ with:
* an authoritative statement on what TCK aspects can be discussed in
public based on the TCK NDAs.
Status: Incomplete
10. Unfinished Business
11. New Business
12. Announcements
13. Adjournment
Scheduled to adjourn by 12:00 (Pacific). Adjourned at 11:10
============
ATTACHMENTS:
============
-----------------------------------------
Attachment 1: Report from the VP of Legal Affairs
Relatively quiet (and short) month.
I believe that we are making progress on the Y! proposed additions to the
FAQ, and should be able to close shortly. Short summary of the key issue:
while the ASF as a whole does not confer any official status to
"subprojects", this proposed FAQ would officially recognize that a PMC
may, in fact, produce a number of independent "products".
Simon Phipps forwarded to me a writeup by the FSF on how to retain
appropriate copyright headers on works derived from non-GPL codebases
and incorporated into GPL codebases. I posted this link on
legal-internal, and it didn't provoke any objections, so I asked
Simon to follow these instructions on the Jasper/Glassfish code. I
will follow up to ensure that this is done.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment 2: Report from the VP of JCP
The last month has been very quiet. We have made no progress on the TCK
license for the Harmony project.
We initiated a motion for vote by both Executive Committees of the JCP,
the committee for Java SE and EE (Apache, BEA, Borland, Fujitsu,
Google, HP, IBM, Intel, Doug Lea, Nortel, Oracle, Red Hat, SAP, SAS,
Hani Suleiman and Sun) and the committee for Java ME (BenQ, Jean-Marie
Dautelle, Ericsson, IBM, Intel, Motorola, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Orange,
Philips, RIM, Samsung, Siemens, Sony-Ericsson, Sun, and Vodafone). The
vote was held by electronic ballot, and finished last week on Sept 13.
The PMO has not announce the results, but I tracked and published the votes
on the board@ list. The vote went as we expected, and I am satisfied with
the result. For the record, the motion was as follows, bracketed by
"-=-" :
-=-
This is a very important issue and the proposers of this motion
recommend that each EC member use the ballot period to review this
question within their respective companies and get whatever business
or legal opinions they feel that they need to get in order to come
back with a firm position.
Motion: We move that the ECs adopt the following statement:
"TCK licenses must not be used to discriminate against or
restrict compatible implementations of Java specifications
by including field of use restrictions on the tested
implementations or otherwise. Licenses containing such
limitations do not meet the requirements of the JSPA, the
agreement under which the JCP operates, and violate the
expectations of the Java community that JCP specs can be
openly implemented."
-=-
The results of the vote are JCP confidential. However, I encourage all
interested parties to inquire with the various members of the executive
committees. I also plan to ask each EC member if we can indicate their
vote on our website, either with their name attached, or anonymously.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment 3: Status report for the Apache Security Team Project
Security Team Project chair apologies for lack of August status report.
There continues to be a steady stream of reports of various kinds arriving
at security@apache.org. These continue to be dealt with promptly by the
security team. For July/Aug 2007 we had 19 non-SPAM new issues:
9 Support question
3 Phishing/spam/attacks point to site "powered by Apache"
7 Vulnerability report
A new set of HTTP Server releases this month fixed a number of
moderate severity security issues, and included a work-around for a
browser vulnerability, CVE-2007-4465. We also gained access to add
comments directly into the National Vulnerability Database, useful for
adding official statements to disputed issues.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment 4: Status report for the Apache Travel Assistance Committee
There's been hardly any activity in the travel assistance committee since
the last board meeting. (William Rowe has done some investigation of
financial aid formulas and metrics for determining financial
eligibility).
I take personal responsibility for the committee inaction, having been
newly appointed Chair and then being absent from any involvement for the
past 3 weeks. (a short but urgent interval with the upcoming dates for
ApacheCon US). It's been a difficult month for me personally, and my
enthusiasm seems to have outraced my availability. Consequently I have
sent a note to the mailing list noting that I would like to step down
from the role of Committee Chair.
Personally, I still think this initiative is a good idea-- it's probably
too late for ApacheCon US 2007, but perhaps it can be revived in the
future. But without at least 2-3 members actively interested in
promoting this effort, it will be difficult to gain or maintain momentum.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment 5: Status report for the Apache Conference Planning Project
* ApacheCon US/2007
November 12-16, 2007
Leader: Rich Bowen
ASF member registration fee: US$400.
Registration for ApacheCon US has been open for some time, and
trainings are selling well. Individual speakers are promoting their
own talks, which seems to be a very effective model. There's 55 days
remaining until the conference, and 5 days remaining before the end
of the Early Bird prices.
Exact registration numbers and revenue forecasts are not yet
available.
* OS Summit Asia/2007
Leaders: J Aaron Farr, Justin Erenkrantz, Noirin Plunket
ASF member registration fee: not yet determined.
This is not a traditional ApacheCon, being co-located with
an Eclipse event in Hong Kong.
Registration has opened, but according to Charel we've had very few
people registar so far. That is in part due to the fact neither
Apache nor Eclipse have sent out announcements to their committers
about registration. We definitely need to pick up the ball on this
end and get the word out.
We have a handful of sponsors at this point, including (in no
particular order):
Covalent
Google
Morph Labs
DevZuz
Outblaze
Sopera
Webtide
There was a thread recently on the planners mailing list about
committer rates and about a hackathon-like event. Details on both
items have not been settled.
We have settled on Li Gong from Mozilla for one of the keynotes.
Another keynote will be a panel of local open source luminaries. I
think we're still arranging the final keynote.
So far the cooperation between Eclipse and Apache seems to be going
well. I am a bit worried about balls being dropped as time is
increasingly short, but maybe that's just a reflection of my own
personal hectic schedule.
* ApacheCon Europe/2008
Leader: Lars Eilebrecht
This event will be held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. ApacheCon
Europe 2008 will be held April 7-11 at the Mövenpick hotel in
Amsterdam, The Netherlands (same location as the Europe 2007
conference). Currently SCP has a contract with the Mövenpick hotel
for 2008, but Charel Morris (SCP) is considering to stay in
Amsterdam for several years in order to build the conference and
attendance. However, no final decision has been made. The Europe
2008 conference will (like previous conferences) consist of 2 days
of training sessions and 3 days of normal sessions. The call for
papers will be published by the end of September. For the first
time the call for papers will include 2-day training sessions in
addition to half-day and full-day training sessions. Regarding
2-day sessions, we are contacting potential trainers directly in
addition to the call for papers. The deadline for the call for
papers will be 26 October 2007, and the planning meeting will be
held 10+11 November 2007 in Atlanta (the weekend before ApacheCon US
2007). The www.eu.apachecon.com Web site still shows the old 2007
data, but has been updated to include a note about the date and
location of the Europe 2008 conference, and the upcoming call for
papers. The ApacheCon Europe 2008 planning team (currently)
consists of the following ASF members: Martin van den Bemt, Noel
J. Bergman, Rich Bowen, Danese Cooper, Shane Curcuru, Lars
Eilebrecht, Justin Erenkrantz, Santiago Gala, Nóirín Plunkett,
William A. Rowe, and Carsten Ziegeler. The lead for ApacheCon
Europe 2008 will be Lars Eilebrecht, with Nóirín Plunkett being the
co-lead. The contact address for the planning team is
planners-2008-eu@apachecon.com. Arje Cahn (Hippo) was a great help
with ApacheCon Europe 2007 (mainly regarding PR), and he has offered
to help with the 2008 conference again.
* ApacheCon US/2008
Leader: None yet chosen
This will be held in New Orleans.
* ApacheCon Peru/2008
Leader: None yet chosen
This event will be co-located with the VISION 2008 conference
as USMP in Lima. The name may be other than ApacheCon, like the
OS Summit was. However, since there is already VISION 2008 and
Open Source Day happening, it's unclear what the name of our
portion will be.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment 6: Status report for the Apache Audit Project
There's been no audit activity in the last month.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment 7: Status report for the Apache Public Relations Project
Not too much to report this month. We had 2 ASF PRs go out, one
regarding the 2.0 release of Geronimo and the other regarding the
renewal of the Open Group Compliance for ApacheDS. J. Aaron is
working a draft ASF Logo usage document, using the Eclipse policy
as a starting point. Issues regarding the ApacheLounge site was
brought to PRC attention from the httpd dev@ lists, where it was
observed that they were using the feather logo in an unacceptable
way, as well as misuse of the Apache mark. The feather usage was
resolved and they are currently reworking the site to address the
other issues. We are close to closing the maven.org issue, with
final resolution depending on Infra's feedback on the management
and oversight of the Maven repository. Jim has been working on
obtaining a proposal regarding a retainer relationship with an
external marketing/PR organization. More detail will be provided
to the board at the meeting if any exists. And finally, as noted
in resolution 7D, the PRC has voted Ted Husted for membership
within the PRC.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment A: Status report for the Apache APR Project
It seems that this report again coincides with new releases. Immediately
following our June report, apr 1.2.9/0.9.14, apr-util 1.2.8/0.9.13 and
apr-iconv 1.2.0 were all released smoothly as expected.
This month, APR 1.2.11/0.9.16, and APR-util 1.2.10/0.9.15 libraries were
released. Both were re-rolled after the first try to pick up heavy activity
around the regression tests and to accommodate some of the platform tweaks.
Two interesting tweaks in the recent release may have interesting side
effects; APR determined to respect Mac OS/X's claim to handle only utf-8
filenaming conventions (as their UI, Aqua does) while on Win32 the process
creation was tweaked to mirror Unix's behavior for pipe inheritance and
therefore avoid leaking handles (in fact this leveraged the implementation
in OS2's APR code). Apparently some third party libraries are negatively
impacted by this second adjustment, since they had relied on the side effects
of the old Win32-only behavior. Work is in progress and a dialog is ongoing
to address those users concerns and provide them an alternate behavior which
is portable.
From June to date in September, we had some 12 commits to apr-iconv/trunk,
64 commits to apr-util/trunk and 97 commits to apr/trunk (the future 1.3
or 2.0 version and first stop of all bug fixes on their way to a release
branch), by 14 active committers, many maintenance commits on the legacy
branches. From early July through early August the bugs were brought down
to some 25 open incidents at a time, since then this has crept back up to
to the low 30's, below the previous average. Some 36 bugs were closed,
and 6 tagged needing feedback, leaving 16 active bugs and 4 stale bugs
looking for some resolution.
Nothing much to report on community activity, two committers were added
in this period, davi and rpluem, both of whom were then active in this
period. One request for commit karma was returned to the requester, with
a counter-request for that individual to submit patches. Based on those,
they would be considered again for commit access at a later date. This was
in contrast to an earlier policy, which brought in httpd, svn and similar
users with minimal scrutiny, if they came from any sibling community. It
seems that policy may no longer fit the apr pmc's wishes, so I would expect
all commit karma moving forwards will follow the typical route of accepting
patches, granting committer status to frequent patch submitters, and then
considering active committers for PMC membership.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment B: Status report for the Apache Cayenne Project
Development
-----------
* Active development of Cayenne 3.0.
* Posted 3.0M1 release - the first milestone release of 3.0 that's
been in development for some time.
* Started JSR-220 (JPA) TCK testing.
Community
---------
* Aristedes Maniatis joined the Cayenne PMC.
* Activity on both user and developer lists is about average.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment C: Status report for the Apache Commons Project
Summary
=======
Not that much happened this month.
o A couple of new people on the scene that expressed their
willingness to contribute
o Discussions of "sponsoring" compress with code from TrueZip
- https://truezip.dev.java.net/
- one man show
- ASL2.0
o Consensus on using continuum for nightlies
Releases
========
o None
Infrastructure
==============
o Some problems with the site m2 site builds
o Discussion about nightlies and CI
- build "nightlies" only on commits keeping the last 5
successful build
- pure convenience
- does not replace GUMP (different purpose)
Community
=========
o No new committers
o No new PMC members
-----------------------------------------
Attachment D: Status report for the Apache Excalibur Project
Highlights:
* 2 new PMC members: Ralph Goers and Stefano Bagnara
* 1 release: cornerstone library bugfix release
* 1 Current vote on a new committer
Rumors of Excalibur's death have, apparently, been exaggerated. We've
had a relatively active quarter following our last fairly active
quarter with more bug-fix releases and new committers and PMC members
added to the project. Most of our activity is coming from outside the
original core of Avalon/Excalibur developers. Instead, we're seeing
activity from committers of projects which have a dependency on
Excalibur code. Not wanting to leave these projects waiting for
Excalibur folks to wake up, we've been adding any warm bodies who show
up willing to help as committers and PMC members.
With this in mind, I've felt Excalibur could be better served with a
VP who could focus on the project more than I can at the moment. I've
notified the board of my resignation and the Excalibur PMC has voted
to recommend Carsten Ziegeler as the new PMC Chair. Carsten has
followed Avalon and Excalibur for many years and has a clear
understanding of the project's history and the dependencies other
Apache projects have on our libraries. Assuming the resolution
passes, this should be my last report as Excalibur VP.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment E: Status report for the Apache Felix Project
Community
* Added Stuart McCulloch as new committer.
* Added new example application and documentation to the web site.
(http://cwiki.apache.org/FELIX/apache-felix-application-demonstration.html)
* Accepted revised community roles/process document that takes into
account our TLP move.
* Upayavira announced his intention to step down from the Felix PMC
and the actions necessary to do so have commenced.
* New Felix logo and website layout created.
* Donation of Deployment Admin implementation was announced,
expected next month.
Migration to TLP
* Appears to have been completed.
Software
* Released the first 1.0.0 non-incubator release of the Felix
framework, including various sub-project releases to support the
framework (e.g., Maven plugin for creating bundles, shell-related
bundles for interacting with the framework, etc.)
* Uncovered and resolved a couple minor bugs in the 1.0.0 release,
so a 1.0.1 release is already in the works.
* Fixed a number of concurrency issues in the Config Admin and
Declarative Services implementations reported by the user community.
Licensing and other issues
* None.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment F: Status report for the Apache Gump Project
Infrastructure:
* during the reporting time we've received a brand new machine to
replace the old vmgump. Gump was switched over to the new
machine with very little downtime, which really was awesome.
Many thanks to the infrastructure team and Leo.
Technical:
* we've migrated a few more projects to use Maven2 builds and
managed to get above 85% successful builds on vmgump, which is
quite nice. Still we need to do something to make the Maven2
builds work the Gump way. Some experiments have been started in
svn, but nothing that could be used as the real solution has
been reached, yet.
* Looking at the Gump zone[1], switching to Java6 would bring our
success ratio down immediately. As usual some of the core APIs
in Java have changed (this time it's JDBC again, as it was with
Java 1.4 - in Java5 it was JAXP) and projects relying on them
have been broken. This is nothing Gump could fix, but it gives
a good indication of how widely supported (or not) Java6 may be
right now in the projects we build.
Other:
* still all Apache committers have access to metadata in svn.
* no releases.
[1] http://gump.zones.apache.org/gump/test/project_todos.html
-----------------------------------------
Attachment G: Status report for the Apache Harmony Project
Summary
-------
Throughout the reporting period Harmony has had active development
across all aspects of the project. There are no issues requiring the
Board's attention.
Development
-----------
The project produced another successful Milestone build at the end
of June 2007. The entire development team collaborated in producing
a stable, well-tested, snapshot build that we called Apache
Harmony 5.0 M2.
Since then there has been the steady and continuous work of bug fixing
and enhancements across all aspects of the codebase. Of particular
note is the effort from a variety of contributors on:
* bytecode verifier : integrating and testing the new Java
bytecode verifier code contribution
* creating download bundles : tested combinations of Harmony
5.0 M2 with Eclipse 3.3 & Tomcat 6.0.13
* code coverage : enhancing tests to increase code coverage
* build-test infrastructure : testing snapshots with more
applications and scenarios
* performance : new JIT and GC algorithms for improved code
generation
* debian packaging : produced some deb packages of Harmony builds
* vm thread redesign : rationalisation of the VM threading model
* vm class unloading : new class unloading feature in the VM
* pack200 : picked-up implementation of complex JSR200 spec
* AWT&Swing : focused attention on stability and robustness
* bootvm : additional work on alternate VM implementation
* java 6 class library : patchy, but steady progression towards
Java 6 APIs
The dev list have been discussing the current practice of producing
milestone builds every two months in addition to our nightly snapshots.
Some would prefer a milestone every three months to enable more
sophisticated work completion, and this topic is still under discussion.
We continue to look to the Board for a successful resolution to the
JCK license impasse.
Security
--------
There was a concern raised about the security of our File.createTempFile
code, and after a short discussion on the dev list our implementation
was changed to the satisfaction of all involved.
There were no other reported security issues.
Community
---------
The community continues to operate in a very healthy manner. Several
developers have published material about Apache Harmony (linked from
the project website), or spoken about the project at developer
conferences. We are collaborating with other projects, both at the
ASF and beyond, including evaluating opportunities to reuse their code
in Harmony.
There have been no new committers or PMC members this period. Upon
receiving Geir's resignation the PMC voted to recommend Tim Ellison as
the new Chair, and Tim was subsequently appointed as such by the Board
in July. There are currently 27 committers, ~22 of whom were active
this period.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment H: Status report for the Apache iBATIS Project
Since our June 2007 report, the Apache iBATIS project has spent a
quiet summer providing routine user support. The current codebase is
stable, and over the course of the year, we've put together an
extensive community whiteboard regarding the next generation of
IBATIS, but coding has not yet begun. No community issues to report
-----------------------------------------
Attachment I: Status report for the Apache Incubator Project
The Incubator enjoyed another nice quiet month. Busy, but no conflicts or
problems. A few more new PMC Members were added, and a more couple people
stepped up as Mentors. The recommendation to have at least 3 Mentors per
project, although not universally implemented, appears to be having the
desired effect of smoothing out the ride. And projects are now coming to
the PMC to request additional Mentors when theirs go quiet or need to leave.
Sanselan and Sling have entered Incubation. JSPWiki is due to join shortly.
A couple of other proposals are under consideration.
-------------------------
=== log4php ===
log4php incubation was restarted in July. Three new committers have been
added and a JIRA project has been set up for bug tracking. A maven 2
generated web site has been published to
http://incubator.apache.org/log4php. The source tree was reorganized and an
initial pass at migration to PHP 5 was committed in July, but there has been
little recent activity (possibly due to vacations) and no published
development plan. In the next period, the development team needs to
establish development plan for an initial snapshot.
=== Sling ===
Sling is a framework to develop content centric web applications based on
the idea of modularizing the rendering of HTTP resources. Sling entered
incubation on September 5th, 2007.
The Sling project has just started. The basic infrastructure (mailing lists,
subversion, issue tracker, web site) is mostly in place; the only things
still missing are one committer account and a wiki space. The software grant
for Sling has been received and the initial source code is now available in
svn.
It is a bit early, but we're looking forward to seeing the plan for how
Sling will move itself through to graduation.
=== Sanselan ===
Sanselan is a pure-java image library for reading and writing a variety of
image formats.
The Sanselan project has just started. Mailing lists, subversion and Jira
are setup and we're currently working on getting the remaining bits of the
infrastructure running like the website etc. The CLAs for all initial
committers have been recorded and accounts are pending. The software grant
for Sanselan has been received and the code base will be committed to svn as
soon as the accounts are created.
=== River ===
River is aimed at the development and advancement of the Jini technology
core infrastructure. River entered incubation on Dec 26, 2006.
Jini technology is a service oriented architecture that defines a
programming model which both exploits and extends Java technology to enable
the construction of secure, distributed systems which are adaptive to
change.
The last artifact, the QA framework, has been voted in and landed in SVN.
An automated build environment has been put in place and finally all
outstanding issues from the Sun issue tracking system have been manually
migrated in a large group effort to JIRA.
The River community agreed to do a first release to show the larger Jini
community it is serious in its efforts. It ain't a very ambitious release
and will be almost an equivalent of the last release done by Sun but
includes the ServiceUI code. This release also allows the River community to
get acquainted and find out about many of the ASF procedures. No
transformation of the com.sun.jini namespace to org.apache.river will take
place, but the River community is aware it has to do that and will find an
opportune moment for that during incubation.
Perhaps as a side effect of the ambitions for the first release discussions
on new functionality don't seem to take off very well, but that time is used
to discuss the process the River project believes it needs to establish.
Although most committers have expressed their desire to have code-review
before code is committed, due to complexity of the codebase and the
difficulty to test many aspects properly, it seemed hard to decide to what
extent to enforce that. A proposal for the initial process guidelines is up
for a vote now that combines RTC for public API and CTR for implementation
details.
US export regulations apply to the River codebase and although discussed in
the very early days we were living under the (wrong) impression that
complying with them only applied when we were about to release. We are aware
now that we should have taken care of it even before the code landed in SVN
and we are going to comply as soon as possible.
=== TripleSoup ===
Did not report.
TripleSoup entered Incubation in February 2007.
TripleSoup is intended to provide an RDF store, tooling to work with that
database, and a REST web interface to talk to that database using SPARQL,
implemented as an apache webserver module.
There was a lot of traffic in February and April, but very little since
April. The Incubator PMC will inquire whether or not it is time to mark
TripleSoup as dormant.
=== Lokahi ===
The last word of discussion some 3 months ago was about infra, the creation
of the lokahi wiki site. It has since been unused. Some banter on the tail
end of ApacheCon EU/07 included ideas about docs and deployment help, and
some ideas about DB backends.
The last commit activity in the same timeframe were the beginnings of a
jackrabbit connector, no other activity for commits@ since then.
There has been no activity on private.
The Incubator is expressing concern over the dormant state of Lokahi, and
what can be done to revive it, since there seems to be more user interest
than developer interest at this time.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment J: Status report for the Apache Jackrabbit Project
Apache Jackrabbit is a fully conforming implementation of the Content
Repository for Java Technology API (JCR, specified in JSR 170).
The Apache Jackrabbit project is in good shape. We have no board-level
issues at this time.
o Releases
Apache Jackrabbit 1.3.1 was released in July.
We are currently working on the 1.4 release, due out later this year.
Jackrabbit 2.0, with JCR 2.0 support, will likely be released next year.
o Community
Christoph Kiehl and Thomas Müller were added as a committers and
PMC members. Brian Moseley resigned to emeritus status.
The Jackrabbit PMC decided to sponsor the new incubating Sling project.
There is lots of community overlap and interest in seeing more open
source tools built on top of the JCR API.
Our two Google Summer of Code projects ended successfully, even though
the amount of community interaction related to the projects was lower
than expected. The resulting JCR example applications will be used as
a part of Jackrabbit documentation.
There will be a JCR session in ApacheCon US, and JCR training (assuming
enough attendance) in both ApacheCon US and OS Summit Asia. The Sling
project will also be presented.
o Development
We are seeing lots of development related especially to query features
and a new storage model for binary content. There has also been
interest in threads and locking behaviour within Jackrabbit core.
We are promoting two prominent subprojects, the OCM and SPI
layers, to release components in Jackrabbit 1.4.
JSR 283 has released the public draft of the upcoming JCR 2.0
specification, and we have started working on implementing the new
new features. The goal is to make Jackrabbit 2.0 (or an early snapshot
of the release) the reference implementation of JSR 283.
o Infrastructure
We are considering switching from MoinMoin to Confluence for our wiki
and using Confluence to manage also our official web site.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment K: Status report for the Apache Jakarta Project
=== Status ===
A discussion was started to merge HttpClient & Slide codebase (at least the
client part of it), but no further action was taken on a TLP proposal.
I like to thank everyone who helped out during my absence.
Oleg made a correction about the TLP proposal, that no action was taken :
This is not quite correct. I put together a TLP proposal [1] but given
the fact only one Slide developer expressed _any_ interest in a joint
TLP we are currently considering reverting back to the original plan of
going TLP alone. Roland Weber withdrew his support for the proposal
given virtually non-existent interest on the part of Slide community
[1]
http://wiki.apache.org/jakarta-httpclient/ApacheHttpComponentsTlpProposalDraft
=== Releases ===
* 7 July 2007 - !HttpComponents !HttpCore 4.0 alpha 5
* 11 July 2007 - JMeter 2.3RC3
* 20 July 2007 - !HttpComponents !HttpClient 4.0 alpha 1
* 22 August 2007 - !HttpClient 3.1 final
* 05 September 2007 - JMeter 2.3RC4
=== Community changes ===
Alf Hoegemark joined as a committer working on the JMeter project.
=== Subproject news ===
==== BCEL ====
Is not maintained. The user list is very low traffic, but people get their
questions aswered.
==== BSF ====
There was a discussion on the next steps after the BSF release. Userlist is
very low traffic.
==== Cactus ====
No development has taken place.
==== Commons ====
Commons has gone TLP and is currently not dependening on jakarta resources
anymore. At the time the commons TLP resources weren't setup completely,
commons still made use of Jakarta resources :
The Commons TLP release of CLI 1.1 was done using the Jakarta resources and a
couple of other votes were held on the jakarta private list, awaiting the
creation of the commons TLP lists.
==== ECS ====
A patch was applied by Henri Yandell to accomodate a user.
==== HttpComponents ====
HttpCore 4.0 alpha 5 has been released. Alpha 6 is scheduled for end of
September or early October and will introduce the last set of significant API
changes. We expect to release the first beta later this year.
The first alpha of HttpClient 4.0 was released and we're gearing up for the
second.
HttpClient 3.1 final was released. It is expected to mark the end of the old
codebase. A little confusion about the HttpClient 3.x web site arose during
the Commons TLP move. For historical reasons, the web site was located under
/commons in Jakarta and got moved to the new TLP. The problems are resolved
now and the web site is back at Jakarta under /httpcomponents.
Discussions about HttpComponents going TLP continue on a low flame.
==== JCS ====
Not much activity since the 1.3 release. User list is active, but not high
traffic.
==== JMeter ====
JMeter 2.3RC3 was released
Alf Hoegemark joined as a committer.
==== ORO ====
No activity needed.
==== Regexp ====
No activity needed.
==== Slide ====
Is not maintained anymore. The users seem to help out each other.
==== Taglibs ====
Henri Yandell has taken action to determine which taglibs should still be
supported and moved a couple of taglibs into deprecated state. Also a couple
of bug fixes were applied.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment L: Status report for the Apache Labs Project
The activity on Apache Labs is small but steady. There are no community
issues and no things that the board should be concerned about.
The number of labs continue to grow at the rate of one/two every month
and most of them sit there silently doing nothing or having bursts of
individual activity.
We have yet to see a lab that has been capable of attracting development
from anybody but their primary sponsor and so we remain far from the
"graduation concerns" that we might face if such a pickup would take place.
Overall, even with its small and spotty activity, it is general
consensus that labs provides a necessary substrate for
individual-oriented project-seed nursing that would otherwise be lost or
exit the apache community radar.
At the same time, it is my personal opinion (as I cannot gather hard
evidence of that) that the impossibility of releasing artifacts and the
vague and unbeaten path of lab graduation prevents many of our
committers to choose labs for their seed development.
Not necessarily a bad thing, but worth noting.
Would any of our labs graduate to become a more 'real' project (and show
how painful/straightforward that would be), I suspect others might find
labs more/less appealing for their own individual developments.
Thank you.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment M: Status report for the Apache Lucene Project
TLP
No TLP-specific news this quarter.
LUCENE JAVA
Lucene Java is a search-engine toolkit. Development was active, and a
new release was made, version 2.2. We anticipate releasing version
2.3 this quarter.
NUTCH
Nutch is a web-search engine: crawler, indexer and search runtime. A
steady stream of bug fixes and improvements have been committed into
svn since the last report.
HADOOP
Hadoop is a scalable distributed computing platform. After extensive
testing and bugfixing, release 0.14.1 was released in early September.
Five new committers were added this quarter, Michael Stack, Arun
Murthy, Devaraj Das, Enis Soztutar, and Christophe Taton.
SOLR
Solr is a full text search server. Development was active and we are
in the middle of the development phase for the next release.
LUCY
Lucy will develop a shared C-based core for ports of Lucene to other
languages, such as Perl, Python and Ruby. Only minor, sporadic
progress has been made this quarter.
LUCENE.NET (incubating)
The mailing list and issue tracker have been much more active. One
contributor ("DIGY") has been solely responsible for cleaning up a lot
of unit tests. The sole committer, George, has been keeping up with
the issues.
TIKA (incubating)
Tika is a toolkit for detecting and extracting metadata and structured
text content from various documents using existing parser libraries.
Tika entered incubation on March 22nd, 2007.
Rida's Lius Lite code has been committed and Tika now has a baseline
from which to go forward. There have been some further design
discussions on Tika mailing list but the traffic there is generally
low.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment N: Status report for the Apache Maven Project
1) New central repository machine
We have a new machine hosted at Contegix for the Maven Central
Repository. It is purely a machine for hosting the central repository
and no other services are running their like blogs, or mailing lists.
Henri Yandell was still going to talk to the folks on the board about
using the maven.org, but again this is not important. The name can
change and no one sees the domain anymore apart from my email address
and the main repository URL. Everything is running well, and the
machine pretty much has 100% uptime.
2) Creation of a repository maintainers mailing list, was moved here
from maven.org
All the lists were moved from the maven.org machine to Apache.
3) Monitoring of the central repository by Gomez using Webperform
Gomez has provided some repository monitoring, and the alters get sent
to the repository-maintainers list but nothing has gone wrong so we
haven't really had to make use of this. But it's up and running and we
will be alerted in the event something happens.
4) New Maven Development Dashboard for Community Visibility
I have tried to put more information about the project in one place as
people generally have no idea what's going on with the project. Folk
can now take a gander at the link below to find out about work in
progress, design, development process, our taxonomy (essentially a set
of categories for Maven), release schedule, recent releases, and
documentation. You can find it all:
http://docs.codehaus.org/display/MAVEN/Home
5) Adding Repository Maintainers
A few people have asked for access to help with the repository and the
first person to hassle me enough to get access is Mauro Talevi. He's
an Apache committer, and will help take care of JIRA requests and is
generally interested in improving the quality of the repository.
6) Allow Project Repository Staging on Maven Central
We are now allowing projects to stage their repositories on central
which means they push to central on their schedule and then we pull on
ours. Hamcrest is the first project that is doing this, and JBoss, and
a few projects at Sun are ready to do the same setup.
7) Moved maven-antlr-plugin to mojo.codehaus.org
8) Discussion about project scope
In the last month, there have been discussions on the private list
about whether the scope of the Maven project is too large. There seems
to be some consensus that at least two subprojects would be better
suited as standalone projects, and may seek to become top level
projects in the future. Both are currently in the middle of releases,
so while there will be no rush, the next step is to take that
discussion public on the individual project lists.
9) Continuum installation and vmbuild
Several Continuum contributors (and some other volunteers) have
recently volunteered to help maintain installations of Continuum as
part of the ASF infrastructure. This has been set up for various ASF
projects that wanted to use Continuum. Currently, there are two
installations maintained by the group: vmbuild1.apache.org and
maven.zones.apache.org.
10) The Apache Forrest Team gives to the Apache Maven Team the
Forrestdoc project [1] [2]. The Maven Team is now the main maintainer
of this project.
[1] http://www.nabble.com/-Proposal--decide-the-future-of-forrestdoc-tf4060050.html
[2] http://www.nabble.com/Forrestdoc-and-Maven-JXR-tf3864888s177.html
11) Imported projects
The shade-maven-plugin and archetypeNG code have had ip clearance
filed and have been imported into the sandbox where work continues.
12) Official call for 2.1 Proposals
An official request for 2.1 proposals was made on the dev and user
lists. [add details about what we ultimately do with them here]
http://www.nabble.com/Gathering-proposals-for-2.1-tf4374871s177.html#a12470180
http://www.nabble.com/Call-for-2.1-Proposals-tf4381308s177.html#a12489582
13) Transfer of Maven Clover Plugin to Atlassian
Atlassian has acquired Cenqua, the provider of the clover plugin. They
have thus requested to fork the source over to their systems and
continue to maintain it on an Apache license.
The source in Maven's SVN was moved to /retired for future reference.
http://www.nabble.com/Atlassian-to-bring-Maven-Clover-plugin-development-in-house-tf4345201s177.html
14) Maven Site Linkchecked
Lukas ran a link checker to validate and fix our site.
http://www.nabble.com/maven-site-linkchecked-tf4363612s177.html
15) Maven Artifact
The Maven Artifact code has been removed from the core of 2.1 and made
a new top level Maven project. The new version is 3.0 to indicate the
history. This new code will be shared in common between 2.0.x and 2.1
possibly starting with the 2.0.9 release.
* New PMC Members
Wendy Smoak
Maria Odea (Deng) Ching
* New Committers
Mark Hobson
Raphael Pieroni (Archetype)
Mauro Talevi (shade)
Olivier Lamy
Herve Boutemy
* Releases
Maven 2.0.7 (Wednesday June 20th, 2007)
Maven 2.0.6 (Sunday April 1st, 2007)
Maven 2.0.5 (Wednesday Februrary 14th, 2007)
Maven 1.1 (Monday June 25th, 2007)
Maven Ant Tasks 2.0.6 (Monday May 28th, 2007)
Maven Install plugin 2.2
Maven One Plugin 1.1 (Monday June 4th, 2007)
Maven Release Plugin 2.0-beta-6 (Wednesday June 6th, 2007)
Maven IDEA Plugin 2.1 (Saturday June 23rd, 2007)
Maven Enforcer Plugin 1.0-alpha-3 (Tuesday, July 10th, 2007)
Maven Eclipse Plugin 2.4 (Tuesday, July 10th, 2007)
Maven Shared JAR Utilities 1.0 (Thursday July 12th, 2007)
Maven Javadoc Plugin 2.3 (Saturday July 21st, 2007)
Maven Changelog Plugin 2.1 (Wednesday July 25th, 2007)
Maven DOCCK Plugin 1.0-beta-2 (Thursday August 9th, 2007)
Maven EAR Plugin 2.3.1 (Tuesday August 21st, 2007)
Maven Model Converter 2.2 (Wednesday August 22nd, 2007)
Maven Archetype Plugin 1.0-alpha-6 (Wednesday August 29th, 2007)
Maven One Plugin 1.2 (Wednesday September 12th, 2007)
Maven Ant Plugin 2.0 (Friday, September 14th, 2007)
Archiva 0.9-alpha-2 (Friday May 18th, 2007)
Archiva 1.0-alpha-1 (Tuesday June 5th, 2007)
Archiva 1.0-alpha-2 (Friday June 29th, 2007)
Archiva 1.0-beta-1 (Friday August 10th, 2007)
Continuum 1.1-alpha-2 (Monday May 7th, 2007)
Continuum 1.1-beta-1 (Wednesday July 25th, 2007)
Continuum 1.1-beta-2 (Friday August 17th, 2007)
Doxia 1.0-alpha-9 (Wednesday September 12th, 2007)
Doxia-sitetools 1.0-alpha-9 (Wednesday September 12th, 2007)
Maven Release Manager 1.0-alpha-3
Maven Verifier 1.1 (September 7, 2007)
-----------------------------------------
Attachment O: Status report for the Apache ODE Project
Since last month we've made an important 1.1 release. There are no
specific issue relevant to the board at the moment.
* Release
We've released our first official release since we graduated and our
second all time release. So far it's been well received with only the
usual couple of minor bugs. We're planning a 1.1.1 to address those.
We've been pleased to learn that Lomboz (Objectweb) has added support
for simple deployment on ODE using this release. Paul Brown has also
written a nice tutorial for InfoQ.
* Development
The main development branch has been merged into the (now unstable)
trunk. This is a longer term development to improve the support for
different communication styles (blocking, asynchronous, reliable and
transactional). Tuscany integration is underway as the BPEL SCA
implementation is being developed. We've also been discussing security
and easier embedding.
* Community
Nothing much on the community side except more users interested by the
new release.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment P: Status report for the Apache OFBiz Project
This report, for September 2007, is the second quarterly report (following
the initial 3 monthly reports) for OFBiz (Open For Business) as a top level
project.
The Open For Business Project (Apache OFBiz) is an open source enterprise
automation software project. By enterprise automation we mean: ERP, CRM,
E-Business / E-Commerce, MRP, SCM, CMMS/EAM, and so on.
We have no issues that require Board assistance at this time, but there are
some concerns from earlier board meetings about OFBiz that this report
hopes to clarify on, and solicit a little feedback on too.
In response to the concerns expressed by the Apache Board in the last
minutes for the meeting happened on 2007-06-20:
http://www.apache.org/foundation/records/minutes/2007/board_minutes_2007_06_20.txt
"The board expressed their concern that it appears that this new PMC
already appears to have some community issues. J Aaron indicated his
willingness to follow the project. It was noted that OFBiz has no ASF
members involved nor any other committers who didn't join during
incubation."
We would like to clarify some points:
- we don't think that the Board's perception of the project is correct,
we have voted a bunch of new committers after the graduation (Adrian,
Anil, Joe, Ray, Scott, Tim) and before that meeting and it is not
completely true that we don't have ASF member involved in the project:
David Welton and Yoav Shapira are in the PMC, even if they act as
supervisor and are not active in the development of OFBiz.
- we have recently added two new PMC members (Scott and Jacques), while
Si is no more a PMC member (but he is still an active committer, very
involved in the project)
- a comment by David Welton (Apache Member and Member of the OFBiz PMC)
sent to the OFBiz private list, in response to a discussion around those
Minutes: "I'm still here, and follow what little goes through the PMC
(it's good that most things happen on other lists!), and it all seems ok."
- we think everything is going well and the community is very active, lots
of activity on the mailing lists, issue tracker, and in SVN
- it would be good to see what more specific concerns are coming up with
the Board so we can either correct the misinformation (as with the no
new committers or PMC members added, not sure how you got that because
it's in the board reports), or find places for improvement
About the concern with no ASF members being really active in the project,
that's a tricky one because we only see two possible solutions (either
would be spectacular from our perspective!):
1) get OFBiz people invited to be members (however it happens naturally
over time)
2) get ASF members interested in participating in OFBiz (there are a few,
like Christian Geisert, that are involved and may move toward becoming
committers and PMC members)
We welcome feedback on which of this is the best to pursue and how to best
do these too.
In general the project is continuing very well. We are currently seeing
around 400 commits per month, which is consistent with the last few months.
The user and dev mailing lists are also seeing good (though down from some
crazy months earlier this year) traffic with around 500-600 messages per
month. New end users and production instances (the few that we find out
about anyway) continue to come along and new faces are showing up on the
mailing lists regularly. There is a steady slow growth trend in list
subscribers, currently around 380 on the dev list, 515 on the user list,
and 100 on the commits list.
The 4.0 release branch is in beta, with the branch around for nearly 5
months now. A lot of effort has gone into back-patching bug fixes, but the
end-user population in still limited so we haven't pushed for a binary
release. Time is moving on though, so in spite of that this should come
along soon.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment Q: Status report for the Apache Portals Project
August 7
Pluto 1.1.3 was released
http://portals.apache.org/pluto/news.html
July 16
Jetspeed 2.1.2 was released
http://portals.apache.org/jetspeed-2/
July 16
Bridges 1.0.3 was released
http://portals.apache.org/bridges/download.html
July 11
Woonsan Ko was voted in as a committer
* Jetspeed 2.1.3 and Bridges 1.0.4 are scheduled for release by the end
of September.
* Jetspeed 2.2 development has started, as a refactoring of the build, to
move to a single Maven-2 build.
* JSR-286 implementation is coming along at Pluto, and we plan to integrate
with it in Jetspeed over the 4th quarter.
* There is also interest in starting a Portals Applications subproject
at Apache Portals.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment R: Status report for the Apache Quetzalcoatl Project
Again not much to report.
I am back from vacation, the TLP creation is now in the Infra queue in the
form of Jira issue INFRA-1355, hopefully it will be done soon.
On the development of mod_python - not much activity. Most likely in 6
months the focus will shift to adapting to Python 3K.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment S: Status report for the Apache SpamAssassin Project
- We won an Infoworld "Best Of Open Source Software 2007" award:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/09/10/37FE-boss-security_1.html
- Multiple vendors are looking to make donations that we'd like Infra to
use to procure hardware for us, in order to relieve the strain we
apparently cause to the zones machine. Discussions are ongoing with
Infrastructure about this.
- SpamAssassin 3.2.2 was released on 25th July, with 3.2.3 released on
August 8th.
- We added Mark Martinec as a committer.
- Bob Menschel and John Gardiner Myers both moved to the "inactive
committers" list, since they haven't committed code in six months;
hopefully they'll be back soon.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment T: Status report for the Apache Tiles Project
Since the last release (5 June) there have been bug fixes and small
improvements. We are slowly working toward a GA release, but we seriously
need more volunteers to step up and help. For the most part we have had
limited time to dedicate to the project.
New features development is slowing down. The project was in a great deal
of flux before the 2.0.4 release and has since stabilized. The user
community is definitely growing and frustration has grown with regard to
our slowness. I hope this will result in both more motivation for us to get
things done and more motivation for others to step up to the plate.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment U: Status report for the Apache Tomcat Project
Summary
--------------
The project continues to be active on a number of fronts. There are
no issues requiring Board attention at this time.
Releases
-------------
We cut a number of releases incorporating all our active branches.
Tomcat 5.5.25 was released this month.
Tomcat 6, the current production branch, had one releases this past
quarter: 6.0.14, which is the latest stable Tomcat at this time.
Finally, the Tomcat connectors, mainly mod_jk, has a couple of
releases as well: 1.2.24 and 1.2.25. However we had to revoke
the 1.2.24 release because of serious regression that slipped trough
the testing phase.
Security
------------
The Tomcat security site (http://tomcat.apache.org/security.html) has
been getting more love and attention. It now contains the vast
majority of known issues and fixes for all Tomcat branches.
We've been working closely with security issue reports and the Apache
Security committee on quickly replying to issues, resolving them, and
coordinating public disclosures.
There exist few open security issues at the moment. The fixes
are already in SVN, and most of them are already incorporated with
6.0.14 and 5.5.25 releases.
Development
-------------------
There is ongoing discussion about the purpose of the current code
inside Tomcat 6 trunk, and the majority of developers have agreed
to put the trunk into the sandbox.
Community
-----------------
After last quarter's new committers and PMC members, there were no
changes the committership nor PMC membership this time.
Mladen Turk was elected as new PMC Chair and voted by the ASF Board.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment V: Status report for the Apache Web Services Project
-----------------------------------------
Attachment W: Status report for the Apache Wicket Project
Apache Wicket is a Java framework for creating highly dynamic,
component oriented web applications, and was established as an Apache
project in June 2007. After this report Wicket will start reporting
using the quarterly reporting schedule.
Summary
The PMC has been undergoing some changes where mentors decided to step
down from the PMC. We voted Gerolf Seitz in as a committer and PMC
member. There are no issues requiring board attention at this time.
Community
The migration of the user mailing list from SourceForge is going well
and users are migrating without problems. User involvement is good,
both when it comes to answering questions and in willingness to submit
detailed bug reports and patches.
Gerolf Seitz was added as a committer and PMC member. We are waiting
on confirmation of receipt of Gerolf's CLA before proceeding to add
him to the PMC. Bertrand Delacretaz and Sylvain Wallez have stepped
down as PMC members, Upayavira stays on the PMC to ensure sufficient
member representation.
Software
We have released the third beta for our 1.3 release. The number of
open issues is slowly decreasing. A fourth and hopefully final beta is
scheduled to be released at the time of the board's meeting.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment X: Status report for the Apache Xerces Project
Xerces-J
Development of the StAX implementation picked up again over the summer.
Thanks to our student participating in GSoC, Xerces' StAX implementation
now has basic XMLStreamReader and filtering support. A Xerces-J 2.9.1
release was recently proposed for September 14th to roll up all of the
bug fixes and minor improvements we've made in the nine months since the
2.9.0 release. Hopefully this will include a fix for [WWW] XERCESJ-589,
one of the most popular (8 votes) long standing bugs in JIRA. We've been
getting help with this one from the community, as none of the active
developers have deep enough knowledge of this part (the regex
implementation) of the code or the time to attempt a re-design which
would avoid the deep recursion.
Xerces-C
We have still not managed to get enough interest from the community to
test the new build system on enough platforms to feel comfortable
releasing 3.0. There has recently been interest in a 2.8 release with
some performance and bug related patches in. Boris Kolpackov volunteered
to be release manager. 2.8 was released on 30th August. We were
pleasantly surprised with the amount of interest and help we had from the
community in releasing 2.8 and hope to continue this momentum to release
3.0 in the next 4-6 weeks.
We also (finally) moved the website to xerces.apache rather than
xml.apache. A vote has started on Boris becoming a committer.
Xerces-P
Nothing in particular to report. Just a few posts to the mailing list. No
development activity.
XML Commons
A few improvements and Javadoc fixes were applied to the JAXP 1.3 API
code. DOAP files were created/updated for xml-commons-extrenal and the
resolver which are now visible on projects.apache.org. The
xml-commons-external-1.2.06 (JAXP 1.2) release is still pending. No other
activity to report.
-----------------------------------------
Attachment Y: Status report for the Apache XMLBeans Project
The project continues to be active.
There are no issues requiring Board attention at this time.
For the last months activity on user list is about the same, on the dev
list decreased a little compared to previous quarter when the 2.3 release
was prepared. A new feature that allows XMLBeans instance objects to
interact with Hibernate and other frameworks that use public empty
constructors, was discussed on the dev list.
Jacob Danner was voted and added as a new committer.
There were no PMC changes this quarter.
------------------------------------------------------
End of minutes for the September 19, 2007 board meeting.
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